MarketingShift Online Marketing Blog

Wednesday, October 05, 2005

Upcoming.org Snatched Up By Yahoo

I like the way Yahoo! has started to move in recent days. Acquiring smaller, more nimble companies, rather than huge bohemoths is always nice to see. A few months back you'll recall Yahoo! acquiring Flickr, a photosharing site I personally enjoy as does my wife. And today they announce the acquisition of Upcoming.org. It's an events database with a nice little api that has some good niche data for their market segment. You'll notice that both Flickr and Upcoming.org had an API prior to being acquired by Yahoo!

That's a sign of the times my friends.

It's no longer difficult for smaller companies to offer up an API and use it for business development slash product management purposes. Plus it makes you quite attractive if you like sharing data and have a lot of data to share. You become the expert in your niche market and expert data aggregators and analysts are what the search engines are all about these days and will be for years to come. As long as that niche fits into their big picture [2 - 3 year product dev roadmap] then you're golden. Toss in a few thousand members and a couple hundred users of your API and the price goes up.

On a more personal note, take my buddy Pete. Pete was just showing me a little natural language search tool he built on top of the Upcoming.org API last week. Being a geek he thought it would be much cooler to build an app that allowed him to plan a romantic weekend away with his girlfriend than use any of the existing sites / tools out there. So he hooked into the Upcoming.org API and away he went to geek lala land. Then today he posts about that little app and the Upcoming.org guys mention it in their blog.

The world of data analysis and integration from disparate sources is getting smaller and smaller every minute. Are you going to be a leader in that area? If you don't plan on being a leader in it then you can plan on being out of business in 2 years. No I'm not kidding. The excuse of being a small mom and pop shop is not enough to keep you from suffering that fate. Like the motorcycle cop that handed me a ticket for doing 37 in a 25 mph zone a few weeks back said, ignorance is no excuse.

Congrats to the Upcoming.org folks on a job well done and good luck with the integration at Yahoo! They're a swell company and I'm sure it'll all work out quite nicely.

From Upcoming's homepage...

"Upcoming.org is now a part of Yahoo! and use of this site is now subject to the Yahoo! Privacy Policy. Please read the policy for important information about the personal data we collect from you and how we use it."

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